Pages

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Time heals

Wa-wa. Pitiful me. I just
looked back over the project I’ve been working on for the last two months and
it is junk.

It was my NaNoWroMo story.
I didn’t finish it in November and kept at it in December. It was starting to
gum up in the middle so I figured I would print it out and read what I had.
That wasn’t a good idea.

It is total crap.

How can something that
held such promise fade away to nothing?

And
what is to be done about it? It seems like the harder I work on fixing it, the
more impossible it becomes.

All
writers go through moments like these. I’ve been there a thousand times myself.
It is maddening. One minute you’re up, the next you have no idea how to repair
it.

The
best solution seems to ignore it for a while. Besides the fact that no
solutions is within sight, a few weeks away allows it to stew and work in the
subconscious. That will take a few weeks or longer.

There
are, fortunately, a couple other projects I can turn to. One is a final
revision before shopping for a publisher. The other is another piece that was
put away under similar circumstances. It was finished, but lacking in some way.
Even if I knew what it needed, I couldn’t muster the the zest to do anything
about it.

Time
has passed. I see where it needs to go and I’m ready to tackle it again. Maybe
when I’m done, the issues with the NaNoWriMo story will have worked themselves
out.